During my career, I was able to get a glimpse into many innovative minds. I was honored to spend a week with Stephen Hawking who suffered from a progressive, ultimatly fatal disease called ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. What makes this man incredible is, despite being completely paralyzed, he led an amazingly full life. He traveled abroad, pondered the universe, and enjoyed a warm social life with his wife and three children. I was also privileged to meet Martin Luther King Jr. King’s vision, his dream of freedom, inspired me to start the project that became Outside the Dream: Child Poverty in America (Aperture, 1991), which documented the twelve million children living in poverty in the USA. It became my first published book.
After Outside the Dream, I wandered the nether world of poverty for three decades. I met many children on my travels. I saw babies who had babies themselves. I looked through the camera at youth in urban ghettos, came across homeless kids sleeping in parks and beaches, documented street kids, child laborers, and soldiers who lived by their wits on the streets of Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America. Pictured here are many of society’s outcasts but these are not only images of victims. They are also about inner strength and hope. Ten years into my journey through this desert of neglect, I met organizations and communities creating better lives for children and families, so I started documenting “solutions.”
Stephen Shames
